Douthat State Park Historic District

Douthat State Park in Alleghany and Bath counties, Virginia, covers 4,493 acres and is organized around a fifty-acre lake formed by a dam on Wilson Creek. Between 1933 and 1942, three camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps built nearly everything of historic interest: twenty-five log cabins, a guest lodge, a superintendent's residence, a restaurant, a bathhouse, a boathouse, picnic and camping shelters, maintenance buildings, a fire lookout cabin and forty miles of trails. Developed areas occupy about one-seventh of the park, grouped by function to protect the surrounding landscape. The log buildings, with stone foundations, fireplaces and hand-wrought hardware, exemplify rustic park design, and four of them appeared in the National Park Service's Park Structures and Facilities. Later buildings from 1951 to 1976 do not contribute, though most were designed to blend with the earlier work. The district retains the character of its original 1930s design and reflects the era's state park movement.